Hannah F
Full Member
- Jan 18, 2020
I had a dress very similar to your long skirt. I had to part with it when it became pretty threadbare. I do miss that dress.
What are you reading at the moment? Recommendations welcome
- Thread starter Julie
- Start date
- Mar 1, 2020
Haha yes! @E G Logan
I think reading it was a rite of passage for many. I went the Tolkien route. I found Gormenghast impenetrable even then. Not enough going on.
BUT.
This version is exceptional in its performance by the narrator. It's as if he works some kind of magic and really makes it sing, because when I tried to read it again for the second time about ten years ago, it defeated me for a second time. The prose is often dense and of the school where using ten words when one might do just as well. Dickensian almost.
However, listening to Saul Reichlin they become almost lyrical. Peake was clearly a gifted wordsmith and this is one of those occasions, when for me at least, the audiobook wins hands down.
I think reading it was a rite of passage for many. I went the Tolkien route. I found Gormenghast impenetrable even then. Not enough going on.
BUT.
This version is exceptional in its performance by the narrator. It's as if he works some kind of magic and really makes it sing, because when I tried to read it again for the second time about ten years ago, it defeated me for a second time. The prose is often dense and of the school where using ten words when one might do just as well. Dickensian almost.
However, listening to Saul Reichlin they become almost lyrical. Peake was clearly a gifted wordsmith and this is one of those occasions, when for me at least, the audiobook wins hands down.
E G Logan
Full Member
- Nov 11, 2018
OK. I may give it another go.
(I did smile – well, actually laugh out loud – remembering. Thank you for that.)
a wonderfully jarring book that i'll always, always recommend when people ask for it is This Is Where It Ends by Marieke Nijkamp. it's a fiction thriller that takes place at a high school, and i won't spoil anything, but it used to keep me up at night. worth reading, rereading, and rereading again! check it out!
I'm listening to Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir again and he's used an interesting technique. Two threads of time.
The present, where he has amnesia but is gradually remembering.
The past, which leads up to the reason why he has amnesia and why he is now where he is in the present.
And when he remembers everything in the present, Weir takes us places you never imagined. Brilliant.
The present, where he has amnesia but is gradually remembering.
The past, which leads up to the reason why he has amnesia and why he is now where he is in the present.
And when he remembers everything in the present, Weir takes us places you never imagined. Brilliant.
Bloo
Full Member
- Sep 16, 2021
Holy crap I loved Project Hail Mary. It was even better than The Martian. Mark Watney was MacGyver on Mars. Ryland Grace is MacGyver in space, with heart and soul and amazing character growth Watney can't touch.
I also listened to the audiobook. The subtle editing really makes the most of the format. Anyone who listens to this is in for a treat. Whatever format you choose, DO NOT READ THE BLURB. There is a monster spoiler that I thankfully didn't see until I was finished.
Tears of joy...that's what that book did to me. You will bask in the afterglow long after the last word.
I'm just reading the blurb. Gosh, it's a huge spoiler! I went in blind too and I'm glad for it.
Mel L
Full Member
- Aug 24, 2021
Currently reading -- and loving -- 'The Pleasing Hour' by Lily King. It is a feat how she interweaves bits of historical into the present-day setting in France. Plus, a very interesting example of dialogue taking place in French but reported in English.
MattScho
Full Member
- Dec 3, 2020
The structure reminds me of one of my favorite Welsh novels, Marabou Stork Nightmare, where we get three arcs, all from the same mind. One is deep in a comfortable coma induced hero fantasy, one on the way up from that into a less comfortable state of his (edited) actual memories, and one is the shallow state when he cannot respond, but can hear what the people nearby are saying (about him). It's quite brilliant.
Pamela Jo
Full Member
- Oct 26, 2021
I had not heard of most of these books, but now I want to find them.
1. The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns
Comyns opens with a few savage lines directly from the eponymous Grimm brothers’ tale: “My mother, she killed me / My father, he ate me.” From there, she artfully subverts the story’s basic events to address questions about race, class and depictions of single motherhood. Comyns crafts sentences with the hushed feeling of falling snow, and she begins with a chilly image, too: a woman outside in the winter, peeling an apple, who cuts herself. The reader knows what’s coming – that first drop of blood in the snow.
2. Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
This groundbreaking collection of stories mixes in stinging splinters of fairytales . In The Husband Stitch, a woman strives in vain to keep her husband from untying the green ribbon around her neck. The original 17th-century tale becomes a funhouse of warped mirrors, the woman recognising something of her own futile striving in the fates of unlucky women throughout history. Like Comyns, Machado knows just when, and where, for the snip of the ribbon to happen, leaving the woman headless in the confounding era we’re living now.
3. Once and Forever by Kenji Miyazawa
Miyazawa’s stories recast tales from Japanese folklore. His funny, subtle retellings personify animals with amusing human insecurities and appetites. In one of my favorite stories, two boy crabs compete for the attention of their father until something unrecognisable swishes through the water. The crab children watch, unable to confess their fear until their father names the creature. Once they know what to call a fish, they find the nerve to name their fear aloud.
4. The True Story of Hansel and Gretel by Louise Murphy
Like Miyazawa, Murphy came to prose from poetry, as I did, and I suspect the embedding of fairytale images in fiction may have heightened allure to a poet-novelist, given the central role of imagery in a poem. Murphy’s haunting novel imagines the survival of Hansel and Gretel as Jewish children hiding in the forests of Nazi-occupied Poland. The “witch” who saves their lives has a large, secondhand oven, and Murphy gives her sly and compassionate witch the last page.
5. Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
All of Oyeyemi’s brilliant, slippery novels draw from the well of fairytales. Like Murphy’s retelling of Hansel and Gretel, Gingerbread is a novel about dehumanisation and vulnerable children. Oyeyemi uses these stories to reflect on post-colonial immigration, the crumbs of opportunity left for immigrants stuck in dead-end factory jobs. The gingerbread here is one family’s enduring recipe, which one character describes as tasting of “the actual and anatomical heart of somebody who scarred your beloved and thought they’d got away with it.” Wolves, beware.
Angela Carter in the early 1980s. Photograph: Jane Bown/The Observer
6. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
Carter translated fairytales and reading The Bloody Chamber alongside her translation of Charles Perrault’s 17th century take on Bluebeard, her contrarian impulses, and the pizazz she brings to her images of the female body, become even more remarkable. Translation is an art of hidden mirrors as well, and it requires a similarly keen awareness of what connotations and cultural values readers will bring to the page.
7. The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington
Carrington, like Carter, had a multilingual imagination. She wrote in French, Spanish and English, and the cadence changes slightly in the stories collected here depending on whether she was living at the time in Mexico or in France. The fairytale appetites of her female characters, their impulsive gobbling, for example, of raw rabbits are consistently audacious. The wildness that Carrington found in the primal visual language of those tales transcends any single idiom. I find even a single page of Carrington before breakfast provides me with a greater capacity for audaciousness all day.
8. There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
Petrushevskaya was born in Moscow under Stalin’s rule. Now in her 80s, she’s experiencing old age under Putin. In her brutal, beautiful fairytales, no wolves are ever sated for long. These are stories of appalling hungers, housing shortages. But Petrushevskaya’s characters laugh and have sex and enjoy each other’s company regardless. The dire circumstances of their lives in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia are not what moves the stories forward. Petrushevskaya is more inventive than that, and the English co-translations by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers are superb.
Top 10 forests in fiction
Read more
9. The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
In this Alaskan novel, a childless couple create one – out of snow. For anyone who lives with children who are not made of snow, the quiet, pristine world of this novel will immediately transport you to an elsewhere beyond the often loud and chaotic realm of 21st-century parenthood.
10. Hadriana in All My Dreams by René Depestre
Depestre draws from both Haitian folklore and fairytales in this magnificent novel. Kaiama Glover’s beautiful translation has a female character who gets to drink the Water of Eternal Life that’s usually reserved for royalty in the realm of fairytales. Except here the magic elixir is given to Hadriana, a woman in Haiti who sips it from coconuts she receives from an old man about to emigrate to Jamaica. He offers her more to drink and she senses in her soul the possibility of a second birth, of becoming herself anew.
1. The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns
Comyns opens with a few savage lines directly from the eponymous Grimm brothers’ tale: “My mother, she killed me / My father, he ate me.” From there, she artfully subverts the story’s basic events to address questions about race, class and depictions of single motherhood. Comyns crafts sentences with the hushed feeling of falling snow, and she begins with a chilly image, too: a woman outside in the winter, peeling an apple, who cuts herself. The reader knows what’s coming – that first drop of blood in the snow.
2. Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
This groundbreaking collection of stories mixes in stinging splinters of fairytales . In The Husband Stitch, a woman strives in vain to keep her husband from untying the green ribbon around her neck. The original 17th-century tale becomes a funhouse of warped mirrors, the woman recognising something of her own futile striving in the fates of unlucky women throughout history. Like Comyns, Machado knows just when, and where, for the snip of the ribbon to happen, leaving the woman headless in the confounding era we’re living now.
3. Once and Forever by Kenji Miyazawa
Miyazawa’s stories recast tales from Japanese folklore. His funny, subtle retellings personify animals with amusing human insecurities and appetites. In one of my favorite stories, two boy crabs compete for the attention of their father until something unrecognisable swishes through the water. The crab children watch, unable to confess their fear until their father names the creature. Once they know what to call a fish, they find the nerve to name their fear aloud.
4. The True Story of Hansel and Gretel by Louise Murphy
Like Miyazawa, Murphy came to prose from poetry, as I did, and I suspect the embedding of fairytale images in fiction may have heightened allure to a poet-novelist, given the central role of imagery in a poem. Murphy’s haunting novel imagines the survival of Hansel and Gretel as Jewish children hiding in the forests of Nazi-occupied Poland. The “witch” who saves their lives has a large, secondhand oven, and Murphy gives her sly and compassionate witch the last page.
5. Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
All of Oyeyemi’s brilliant, slippery novels draw from the well of fairytales. Like Murphy’s retelling of Hansel and Gretel, Gingerbread is a novel about dehumanisation and vulnerable children. Oyeyemi uses these stories to reflect on post-colonial immigration, the crumbs of opportunity left for immigrants stuck in dead-end factory jobs. The gingerbread here is one family’s enduring recipe, which one character describes as tasting of “the actual and anatomical heart of somebody who scarred your beloved and thought they’d got away with it.” Wolves, beware.
Angela Carter in the early 1980s. Photograph: Jane Bown/The Observer
6. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
Carter translated fairytales and reading The Bloody Chamber alongside her translation of Charles Perrault’s 17th century take on Bluebeard, her contrarian impulses, and the pizazz she brings to her images of the female body, become even more remarkable. Translation is an art of hidden mirrors as well, and it requires a similarly keen awareness of what connotations and cultural values readers will bring to the page.
7. The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington
Carrington, like Carter, had a multilingual imagination. She wrote in French, Spanish and English, and the cadence changes slightly in the stories collected here depending on whether she was living at the time in Mexico or in France. The fairytale appetites of her female characters, their impulsive gobbling, for example, of raw rabbits are consistently audacious. The wildness that Carrington found in the primal visual language of those tales transcends any single idiom. I find even a single page of Carrington before breakfast provides me with a greater capacity for audaciousness all day.
8. There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
Petrushevskaya was born in Moscow under Stalin’s rule. Now in her 80s, she’s experiencing old age under Putin. In her brutal, beautiful fairytales, no wolves are ever sated for long. These are stories of appalling hungers, housing shortages. But Petrushevskaya’s characters laugh and have sex and enjoy each other’s company regardless. The dire circumstances of their lives in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia are not what moves the stories forward. Petrushevskaya is more inventive than that, and the English co-translations by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers are superb.
Top 10 forests in fiction
Read more
9. The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
In this Alaskan novel, a childless couple create one – out of snow. For anyone who lives with children who are not made of snow, the quiet, pristine world of this novel will immediately transport you to an elsewhere beyond the often loud and chaotic realm of 21st-century parenthood.
10. Hadriana in All My Dreams by René Depestre
Depestre draws from both Haitian folklore and fairytales in this magnificent novel. Kaiama Glover’s beautiful translation has a female character who gets to drink the Water of Eternal Life that’s usually reserved for royalty in the realm of fairytales. Except here the magic elixir is given to Hadriana, a woman in Haiti who sips it from coconuts she receives from an old man about to emigrate to Jamaica. He offers her more to drink and she senses in her soul the possibility of a second birth, of becoming herself anew.
- Mar 1, 2020
I finished the audio version of Gormenghast Book 1. Titus Groan yesterday. And have to say the longer it took to say very little the more peeved I became, wishing in the end, the damn thing would finally finish. Mercifully, it did, but perhaps three to four hours later than it ought to have done. It weighs in at around 22 hours.
If you see my last post in this thread, at the halfway point I was really enjoying it, and particularly Saul Reichlin's amazing reading of the text. That remained fantastic to the (bitter) end as did Peake's gift of wordsmithery. However, if I might extend my thoughts, that is to say elaborate upon my meaning, or perhaps attempt to clarify. Had Peake been a blacksmith instead and used his talents in that trade to the utmost, then I conclude he would have made particularly excellent portcullises for pogo sticks.
At one point and on completion, I had been going to get Gormenghast and carry on with the trilogy, but then concluded that perhaps Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar might afforded me considerably more pleasure.
If you see my last post in this thread, at the halfway point I was really enjoying it, and particularly Saul Reichlin's amazing reading of the text. That remained fantastic to the (bitter) end as did Peake's gift of wordsmithery. However, if I might extend my thoughts, that is to say elaborate upon my meaning, or perhaps attempt to clarify. Had Peake been a blacksmith instead and used his talents in that trade to the utmost, then I conclude he would have made particularly excellent portcullises for pogo sticks.
At one point and on completion, I had been going to get Gormenghast and carry on with the trilogy, but then concluded that perhaps Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar might afforded me considerably more pleasure.
MattScho
Full Member
- Dec 3, 2020
Good to hear a full take, I will scratch it off the list
Brian P. White
Basic
- Mar 5, 2023
The books I tend to read most are my own, but I cheat on myself here and there;^)
Currently:
1. The Willows, by Algernon Blackwood
2. My Little Vixen, by Lulu Waters
3. Viral, by Robin Cook
4. Rogue Asset, by Andrews & Wilson (based on WEB Griffin III+IV)
5. Star Trek Voyager: To Lose the Earth, by Kirsten Beyer
6. Diplomatic Immunity, by Lois McMaster Bujold
7. Bran New Death, by Victoria Hamilton
8. The Three Secret Cities, by Matthew Reilly
9. a couple of parenting books
10. a couple of college textbooks
You'd think I was an avid reader, but I'm really just slow. With everything I have going on, my reading list is like a slush pile now!
Currently:
1. The Willows, by Algernon Blackwood
2. My Little Vixen, by Lulu Waters
3. Viral, by Robin Cook
4. Rogue Asset, by Andrews & Wilson (based on WEB Griffin III+IV)
5. Star Trek Voyager: To Lose the Earth, by Kirsten Beyer
6. Diplomatic Immunity, by Lois McMaster Bujold
7. Bran New Death, by Victoria Hamilton
8. The Three Secret Cities, by Matthew Reilly
9. a couple of parenting books
10. a couple of college textbooks
You'd think I was an avid reader, but I'm really just slow. With everything I have going on, my reading list is like a slush pile now!
Pamela Jo
Full Member
- Oct 26, 2021
Ruth Rendell. Never read her until I found, Judgement in Stone, in a charity shop for a euro. Blew my socks off. No wonder they made her a Baroness. She starts by telling you who is murdered and by whom and how the murderer is caught-then proceeds to keep the reader in tension and suspense to the end of the book.
Pamela Jo
Full Member
- Oct 26, 2021
OMG Jonny I think you should review books like those guys who review movies that you actually want to watch. You made me spit my tea on the screen.
- Mar 1, 2020
Happy to have been of service.
LJ Beck
Full Member
- Aug 20, 2022
I just listened to The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett. I don't remember his Disc World series at all, so I thought I'd revisit it. I enjoyed it. Good silly fun. Nothing that blew my socks off in terms of story. But very imaginative, and Pratchett certainly had a style of his own. Great narration too.
I'm currently reading The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu. It was a slow start, but quite interesting. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.
I'm currently listening to Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky. The 2nd book in "The Final Architecture" series. I'm really enjoying this series. Some really cool ideas, and great characters in this story. Love the narrator too.
Oh and BTW, @RK Capps and @M. Dupré - Project Hail Mary is one of my favorite books of all time. Loved the narration, and I cried happy tears at the end, such was my immense satisfaction of that perfect story.
I'm currently reading The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu. It was a slow start, but quite interesting. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.
I'm currently listening to Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky. The 2nd book in "The Final Architecture" series. I'm really enjoying this series. Some really cool ideas, and great characters in this story. Love the narrator too.
Oh and BTW, @RK Capps and @M. Dupré - Project Hail Mary is one of my favorite books of all time. Loved the narration, and I cried happy tears at the end, such was my immense satisfaction of that perfect story.
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- Mar 1, 2020
Following my usual style of being ten or more years behind the zeitgeist, I've just finished The Martian (Audiobook) by Andy Weir and read by Will Wheaton.
I think in some reviews it's been suggested the previous version narrated by A N Other was superior. Well if indeed it was then it must have been utterly stupendous. But I found WW's stab at it to be pretty dang good y'all.
I LOVED it. It was gripping, engaging and twistier and turnier than the twistiest and turniest thing imaginable. So well put together that - heck - even the advanced physics and maths sections (of which there are quite a few) were excellent.
I am now 1.5 hours into The Hail Mary Project and loving that with equal fervour. The lad Weir can sure spin one helluva yarn.
I think in some reviews it's been suggested the previous version narrated by A N Other was superior. Well if indeed it was then it must have been utterly stupendous. But I found WW's stab at it to be pretty dang good y'all.
I LOVED it. It was gripping, engaging and twistier and turnier than the twistiest and turniest thing imaginable. So well put together that - heck - even the advanced physics and maths sections (of which there are quite a few) were excellent.
I am now 1.5 hours into The Hail Mary Project and loving that with equal fervour. The lad Weir can sure spin one helluva yarn.
LJ Beck
Full Member
- Aug 20, 2022
Bloo
Full Member
- Sep 16, 2021
Have to stop typing now as I seem to have dust in my eyes which is making them water.
You were warned
*passes Jonny a tissue
- Mar 1, 2020
The oldest of clichés applies. I didn't want it to end. My next read has a helluva lot to live up to.You were warned
*passes Jonny a tissue
Hannah F
Full Member
- Jan 18, 2020
Just finished The Wicked King by Holly Black, book 2 of her Folk of the Air series (YA Fantasy). Really enjoyed both books so far and my trips to her faerie world. Saving up to buy book 3.
LJ Beck
Full Member
- Aug 20, 2022
Wow! Just finished five minutes ago.
Amaze!!! Exceptional. Even better than The Martian.
Have to stop typing now as I seem to have dust in my eyes which is making them water.
@LJ Beck
Project Hail Mary
Ah, yes... it's one of those rare perfect books, isn't it? Exceptional indeed. Dust in your eye for sure after that one.
Recently finished Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay, the first book in the The Sarantine Mosaic duology. Really enjoyed it, compelling characters, high stakes, and shades of the numinous to make your hairs stand on end. It's almost-but-not-quite historical fiction (set shortly after the fall of the western Roman empire) – historical fiction that's been nudged towards the fantastic. And it's written like a mosaic, which is grin-inducingly clever.
And from a writerly point of view, it's the first book I've read in ages that used a proper omniscient narrator and lots of (expertly crafted) head hopping. It was, for me, a welcome and refreshing read.
And from a writerly point of view, it's the first book I've read in ages that used a proper omniscient narrator and lots of (expertly crafted) head hopping. It was, for me, a welcome and refreshing read.
smooth head-hopping?!?! added to the reading list!
Well, I suppose I'm being disingenuous. If head-hopping is the mistake of uncontrolled point-of-view shifts, then that's not what Kay does at all. Rather, he uses an omniscient narrator to move between various characters' points of view (and comment on them, in the way that only an omniscient narrator can), sometimes within the same scene, sometimes not.
Lots of authors do this, from Virginia Woolf to Terry Pratchett (Woolf's Mrs Dalloway is the best example I know). I guess "head-hopping" has developed a poor reputation because it's easy to do it badly. And some writing gurus have made not doing it A Rule That Must Not Be Broken. Which is tosh, of course. You can do anything you like as long as it works.
And talking of shifting POVs, I read a great book a while back that cleverly subverts the anti-head-hopping argument. In Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice the protagonist is a sentient AI that can inhabit many bodies, so you get scenes like this:
[Lieutenant Awn] wore the same sort of skirt the head priest did, and a thin shirt and the lightest of gloves. Still, she was sweating. I stood at the entrance, silent and straight, as a junior priest laid cups and bowls in between Lieutenant Awn and the Divine.
I also stood some forty meters away [...]. [T]he temple susurrated faintly in one corner with the whispered prayers of a dozen devotees. [...] Outside the doors of the temple I also stood in the cyanophyte-stained plaza, watching people as they passed.
Wow! Just finished five minutes ago.
Amaze!!! Exceptional. Even better than The Martian.
Have to stop typing now as I seem to have dust in my eyes which is making them water.
@LJ Beck
Project Hail Mary
Incredible, huh? I just listen to it on repeat to help me sleep...